Google Advertising Tools

Chapter 3. Optimizing Sites for Search Engine Placement

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to see it fall, has it really fallen? If no one can find your site, then you are like that unobserved tree. All your work in creating a great site that is the perfect host for lucrative advertising content will be in vain. You certainly won’t make money from your site.

I’ve already explained (in Chapter 2) how you generate traffic by publicizing your site and getting inbound links to it. Provided these inbound links don’t come from bad neighborhoods—sites set up just to exchange links—the more inbound links your site has, the higher its PageRank . A higher PageRank implies a better search result ranking for a given query.

Tip

You can also generate traffic by using advertising such as the Google AdWords program (see Part III).

Besides obtaining inbound links and advertising your site, there are some things you can do when you construct your web sites and web pages that can help your pages with their search order ranking. On the other hand, there are also some things you can do that will harm your prospects.

The general field of constructing web sites and pages to help—and not harm—their chances with search engines is called search engine optimization, or SEO, and is the subject of a certain amount of mystification, perhaps to justify the high consulting rates that SEO experts can charge.

In reality, SEO is pretty simple, and involves the following steps:

• You need to understand how your ...